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Brian Gawalt

@brian.gawalt.com
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  1. 1

    five photos of five red road signs with white text, all against a arid california chapparal type background THOUGH THE DARK OF FUTURE'S PAST THE MAGICIAN LONGS TO SEE ONE CHANCE OUT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS FIRE WALK WITH ME [cursively scripty logo] Burma Shave
    562 145
    Jan 8, 2026
  2. 2

    Screen shot of a tweet from Feb 21 2022 Male Body Inspector @tommyveggies Man i really wish i grew up in the 90s! Everyone dressed so cool back then and the music was real. Also, you’d be called Gay Mike for the rest of your life if you wore a purple shirt once
    Tiffany⸆⸉ @tiffanyclay.dev
    What’s a real thing from your childhood that kids these days would find completely foreign? Like, how we used to be able to walk right up to the gate to meet our family coming off a flight. Or how we had to pick a spot to meet at the theater BEFORE we went.
    547 69
    Jul 14, 2025
  3. 3

    Five part diagram on a white board A) a pig squished into a single point B) a pig stretched to be a line segment C) a pig that is a square D) a pig that is a cube E) two cube pigs coupled to form a hyper pig
    Tricia Lockwood @tricialockwood.bsky.social
    hyperpig
    142 28
    Aug 20, 2024
  4. 4

    i would like to thank @lastpositivist.bsky.social for coining "ok, but no galaxy brain stuff" as a general purpose technology

    Tweet screencap, https://x.com/lastpositivist/status/1348212384037482496 Liam Bright @lastpositivist Adding a single principle to utilitarianism ("ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?") and thereby perfecting moral philosophy. 2:17 AM · Jan 10, 2021
    Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com
    The liberal ability to craft interesting, fruitful Gedankenexperimente has markedly declined. Gone are the days of veils of ignorance or experience machines. Now we conjure up avowed antiliberals to air their grievances at liberals, assuming perfect faith. www.noemamag.com/from-statecr...
    Suppose we wanted to repeat the experiment in 2025. More pointedly, let’s put ourselves in Coronaeus’s shoes: a wealthy and comfortable hegemon at a time when his hegemony was challenged. In the 16th century, that meant being Catholic. In the 21st century, it means being liberal while the liberal-democratic order begins to crack. So, if we, like Coronaeus, want to understand how our rivals live and think, who should we invite? It’s obvious: Liberals should seek out the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural pre-eminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years. In the spirit of naming names, I’d send RSVPs to Aleksandr Dugin of Russia, the philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Brain”; Wang Huning, the shrewd ideologue who has led Beijing for some 40 years; Steve Bannon of the United States, who, whatever his faults, has channeled Trumpism like no one else; Mohan Bhagwat, head of India’s Hindu nationalist movement; Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia for an Islamist perspective; and finally Viktor Orbán, who, although currently the Prime Minister of Hungary, seems to relish rowdy gatherings.
    169 24
    Mar 7, 2025
  5. 5

    Medicaid for all. "Oh no someone is secretly rich in assets and is faking low income to get Medicaid" doesn't matter when everyone gets Medicaid.

    64 16
    May 31, 2025
  6. 6

    replaying w. r. hearst's yellow journalism; replaying henry ford's antisemitism, sure; but i was not anticipating a replay of the triangle shirtwaist company

    Mike Masnick @masnick.com
    So this lawsuit that former employees filed against Twitter last week regarding not paying rent and ignoring building codes has some CRAZY stories. I tried to highlight the craziest ones in this article
    Apparently Elon Doesn’t Think He Needs To Pay Rent Because SF Is A ‘Shithole’; So Why Should We Pay For Twitter?
    It’s no secret that Twitter isn’t paying many of its bills, including the rent for its headquarters. That was rumored last fall, but became much more clear when the landlords sued the company in Ja…
    30 16
    May 22, 2023
  7. 7

    Hm.

    Facebook ad for Fidelity wealth management where two guys in suits are behind a woman in a suit, showing her into an office Scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci, in a suit, is being shown into an office by two guys in suits behind him
    94 14
    Aug 3, 2025
  8. 8

    Zeb from Rebels and I did the word balloon but so now he's saying what luke said
    Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social
    Ezra is a little bitch I'm sorry. Always has been always will be. And he trusts every single motherfucker he meets. On God this boy is dumb.
    118 8
    Jan 1, 2026
  9. 9

    Passed this on from @lukeoneil47.bsky.social in a professional context

    www.welcometohellworld.com/take-some-sm...

    Excerpt from the linked hellworld newsletter: "If you want something perfectly tailored 1:1 to your own taste meant solely for you to experience alone you can already do that just by sitting there and thinking about it buddy. Skip the middle man step of the computer. It's just going to put it back in your brain anyway."
    31 8
    Jan 3, 2025
  10. 10

    @niedermeyer.io I went on FB marketplace to give away some compact discs. now I'm 11 grand in the hole and hoping the CDs will fit in this glove box.

    FB marketplace posting for a 1948 Studebaker Weasel, a weird hybrid of ice cream truck and armored personnel carrier
    53 7
    Aug 25, 2024
  11. 11

    New study going around that I can tell is gonna be one of those long-lived things that doesn't *quite* mean what people are going to assume it means: Fig 1 depicts beef consumption on some Tuesday, and shows that a small share of people ate most of the beef *on Tuesday*

    www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15...

    Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an ...
    Concern for the environment when making dietary choices has grown as the contribution of the food sector to global greenhouse gas emissions becomes more widely known. Understanding the correlates of b...
    17 6
    Aug 31, 2023
  12. 12

    Reply

    Yup, and it's even worse than I remember

    www.latimes.com/archives/la-....

    Excerpt from la times link: "Talk up the stock and talk positively about Enron to your family and friends,” Lay told employees via an electronic forum Sept. 26 with Enron offices around the world. A transcript of the forum was obtained Friday by The Times. “The company is fundamentally sound. At current stock prices . . . this seems to be an incredibly cheap stock.” Advertisement Lay’s comments came at a time when Enron employees still would have been able to sell shares held in their retirement accounts, a window that closed Oct. 26 when the company imposed a so-called lockdown on such trades. The lockdown, which ended Nov. 14, resulted in huge losses for many employee shareholders.
    17 5
    Mar 21, 2025
  13. 13

    I have a joke about Ariadne 1/

    Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com
    I have a joke about Thor's hammer, but it's too short.
    12 5
    Oct 23, 2024
  14. 14

    Lol they scored and he took it off. "We can relax, for now"

    Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
    Senegal's manager put a blazer over the white T today which is how you know they mean business
    67 4
    Jul 1, 2026
  15. 15

    i really need to blog this instead of watching two episodes of "the boys" last night (review: it's fine), but all the rituals of good software engineering -- unit tests, CI/CD, linting -- are *much more important* for statistical analyses that only run once with results then published

    SwiftOnSecurity @swiftonsecurity.com
    "People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced." retractionwatch.com/2015/07/21/t...
    “To our horror”: Widely reported study suggesting divorce is more likely when wives fall ill gets axed
    A widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the origina…
    14 4
    May 17, 2026
  16. 16

    Hey me too, on the Avent one at least

    Hardcover of "In Good Faith" by Ryan Avent held in my left hand
    Jeremy Wallace @jeremywallace.bsky.social
    Today’s haul Excited to read the latest by @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com as well as Ryan Avent
    Books! Muskism and In Good Faith
    4 4
    Apr 23, 2026
  17. 17

    They think they don't need employees anymore and they're determined to find out for sure
    www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff...

    Salesforce sent emails informing employees who left its company kickoff event Tuesday after CEO Marc Benioff made several tone-deaf jokes about ICE that "your absence was noted" during subsequent presentations and gave them a 250-character field to explain themselves, according to Business Insider.
    14 4
    Feb 16, 2026
  18. 18

    Putting together a weekly book club for "Regression and Other Stories" (reply if interested!) and this page, "Common statistical tests are linear models," is a key motivation. If you git gud at regression, so much else comes along for free.
    lindeloev.github.io/tests-as-lin...

    #statsky

    Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats)
    24 4
    Dec 11, 2025
  19. 19

    traffic studies rule and this page permanently changed how i think about driving: blog.jliszka.org/2013/10/01/h...

    How traffic actually works
    Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net
    At the engagement party, Hunt explains in <10 seconds how the effects of a single vehicle slowing down on a highway can ripple through road networks for hours, and the dude he's talking to feigns falling asleep. What the hell? This is legitimately very interesting stuff!
    27 4
    May 23, 2025
  20. 20

    sithuationship

    Quoted post is unavailable
    21 4
    Jun 14, 2024
  21. 21

    When grandkids were visiting (early 90s), my mom's dad set up his DOS terminal to read "Bios load complete. Operating system initialized. Press any key to continue." And when a nosy kid hit any key it'd blare an alarm and strobe, fullscreen bright-blue-on-white, "INTRUDER DETECTED, CALLING POLICE."

    Meredith Rose @mrose.ink
    Tell me something funny about someone important to you who’s passed on. Anecdote, factoid, excellent one-liner—dealer’s choice.
    31 4
    Apr 10, 2024
  22. 22

    Reply to @jfruh.bsky.social

    fun new idea with no downsides here if anyone else wants in

    holy trinity meme with "meaning is not morality is not knowledge" linked in the outer ring and then pointing inward to say "nihilism is {meaning, morality, knowledge}"
    11 3
    Apr 22, 2026
  23. 23

    Let he who is without sin cast the first stone /
    After you, who's last? It's DOOM, he's the worst known /

    Jonathan Edward Durham @thisone0verhere.bsky.social
    What’s your favorite Bible verse? (Wrong answers only)
    26 3
    Apr 17, 2026
  24. 24

    Reply to @brian.gawalt.com

    OK! You start getting a good chance at telling the difference between 49-51 and 50-50, around 150,000 spins (75k per side). You definiely can by 300k spins.

    [deleted original post with bad transparent background making the titles illegible; it's better now.]

    Line chart showing steady linear growth in being able to tell the difference between 49-51 and 50-50, starting at 0% chance with only 100 spins, up to a ~85% chance of detection at 150k spins. Then one last data point shows you have a 100% chance if you spin 320k times. (Again, that's total spins: half on the 49-51 wheel, half on 50-50.)
    15 3
    Aug 26, 2024
  25. 25

    Reply

    Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com
    I have a joke about Ariadne 1/
    7 2
    Jul 19, 2026